Practice to Deceive by Ann Rule

Author:Ann Rule [Rule, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: True Crime, Murder, Hoaxes & Deceptions, General
ISBN: 9781451687378
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2013-10-08T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

* * *

WHEN JIMMIE AND HIS six children arrived at Whidbey Island for his change of duty, he built a house for his family. Their Aunt Ellen opened her home to them until Jimmie had finished the new house. The navy gave him as much leave as it could, but eventually Jimmie had to go back to duty.

He hired a local woman, the divorced mother of two small daughters—Amy, who was four, and Sue, nine—to be a live-in housekeeper and take care of his children. Her name was Doris Alton née Anderson, and she was eight months older than Jimmie.

Physically, Doris was nothing like Mary Ellen. She was not a beauty as Jimmie’s first wife had been, but rather a petite, average-looking woman. She wore her blondish-brown hair cut short and rolled up just below her ears and eschewed makeup.

But Doris pleased Jimmie with her ability at organization and homemaking. That was the most important thing to him as he tried to re-create at least the semblance of a normal household where he and his six children could move past the tragedy they lived through at Moffett Field.

Doris had just been divorced from her daughters’ (Amy and Sue Alton) father, and she needed someone to help her raise them. Alton had signed away all of his legal rights to the girls.

Jimmie wasn’t an outwardly affectionate man; he showed his love for his family by trying to provide everything physical that they needed.

Beyond his expertise in the navy, he was a man who could do virtually anything: carpentry, make furniture, and he was “smart as a whip” according to his children. He was a plumber, mechanic, and he had a photographic memory. Even so, he never could spell or sing.

He had built the fine house on Edgecliff Drive in Langley: seven bedrooms and three bathrooms. All by himself, he sanded, stained, and hung twenty-four mahogany doors.

When Jimmie poured cement for a window well, he let his children place their hands carefully in the wet cement, and then etched their initials beside the small handprints.

They are still there a half century later.

The Stackhouse children came to love Whidbey Island. Along with Sue and Amy, they rode their trikes and bikes all over the south end of the island, rushed down a well-worn trail to the beach every day where they scraped mussels off the pilings or caught minnows with fishing lines tied to their fingers—selling them to fishermen for bait. They swam like fishes themselves, bobbing in the waves. Langley was a small town then, where kids could count on free handouts from merchants: a cold hot dog from the Langley Meat Market or some treat from the grocer.

If there was anywhere the Stackhouse children could begin to feel safe and heal, Langley would have been the place.

Between Jimmie and Doris, they had eight children, all of them born between 1954 and 1961. Jimmie Stackhouse’s new semifamily seemed to be the answer to how he could take care of his motherless children.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.